When is the last time you visited a photo finish shop? For me it was more than 4 years ago when I was completing my final project for my college’s social photography class. I have those pictures to remind my mum how great that cupcake from Sweet Tooth in Buffalo looked like, and other fun scenes dining around town. My project’s title was “Food by Foot”. Yup, I traveled around the city by public transport and foot searching for good eats while trying to finish a class project. That’s my idea of having a good time with coursework. 😉 (Alas I’m still trying to shed away the weight I gained from that project, and more.) I’m glad I have those memories on Flickr, my hard drive and heck, those large physical prints. I have most of my pictures taken post 2009… The crux lies with most, and post 2009. What happened before that was a tragedy that I’m sure is too familiar a story we hear happening to people around, and even ourselves…
I ventured into digital photography sometime around 2004. Shortly before that I spent a short time dabbling around with a video camera. I thought a video camera that was able to take still images would suffice as a digital camera for my use. That’s back in the day where 12 megapixels were unheard of. When I got my first iMac in early 2004, I started editing those family videos I shot and those still images I captured on iMovies and iPhoto. I stored everything on that iMac, and didn’t bother with a backup. When I figured the video cam was crappy at taking pictures, I persuaded my folks to get a “proper” digital compact camera. Yup, that’s the very camera responsible for my website’s namesake. All the pictures I took with that camera were uploaded to iPhoto. I only very selectively uploaded them due to the then meagre upload limit to my free Flickr account. As a student back then I couldn’t afford to pay for the “pro” subscription… I still have those few shots as keepsake on that free account, but everything else was lost for good when the iMac died and when the cloud hosting site which I hosted a bulk of the pictures featured on the blog folded.
A good chunk of what I shot between 2004-2008 are gone. Nothing much I could do but treat it as life’s one big lesson. Yup, just when you thought the cloud’s gonna be the sure way to store those digital memories… It ain’t foolproof. Tech companies fold, get acquired, merged and certain services end up terminated. I found out about that particular cloud hosting company’s demise too late. A chunk of pictures hosted there for the purpose of this blog (when I was still on wordpress.com) were lost. Although they were amateurish works, nothing too important, they are testaments of my progress in photography as well as snippets to my life.
There’s gonna be a gap of memories missing from my life. What sucked most was not losing those pictures on the blog, but the pictures I took with my parents. Inkjet printers used to make shitty prints, by which colors fade with time and exposure to the UV rays. Inkjet prints are much longer lasting these days but the price of those ink cartridges at times add up more than the cost of the printer itself. (Where’s the logic to that?!) Because of that I was reluctant to print most of the photos I took in recent years, keeping them mostly in my archives, and even then the software I used to catalog my pictures was discontinued. There seems no end to this cycle of bad luck.
Now I wrote most of this article back in 2015. In 2016, I made a drastic move… I returned to film photography. On an impulse after watching some youtube videos and ploughing through Instagram, I bought a minty Nikon F3 off eBay. This marked my return to the photo finish shop, signed up for a “lifetime membership” and started actively printing images I took off that camera, as well some prized moments I’d captured digitally.
Hard drives and memory card fail with age, cloud services and image hosting sites go bust as time pasts. The most lasting way you have a copy of your memories and your works is to print them, compile them into albums, photobooks or loose sheets (stored preferably in archive boxes). Whatever works best. That’s the most solid way to ensure your works and memories survive the test of times.